Text page
Plant - Ghosts in the Machine (Review) (New Statesman 1995)
"Plant - Ghosts in the Machine (Review) (New Statesman 1995)" uses review form to turn cultural criticism into a compact diagnosis of cyberfeminist modernity, media systems, and gendered abstraction.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The page matters because cyberfeminism here is not an add-on to the archive's better-known themes. It is one of the places where circuitry, writing, labor, and gender are made to reorganize what counts as a subject or a system.
These texts work by making cultural criticism, theory, and technical description contaminate each other. The result is a model of subjectivity produced through networks, codes, and infrastructural mediation rather than grounded in stable identity.
That matters because the archive's human/machine problem changes once it is read through Plant, Parisi, and later xenofeminist debate. The future stops looking like a neutral technical horizon and becomes a struggle over who or what gets composed by it.
How to read this text
Read for where writing, labor, media, or embodiment are described as technical arrangements rather than background topics. That is where the page usually sharpens.
Keep an eye on how the page positions itself against humanist or moralizing accounts of technology. The section's strongest interventions are usually anti-essentialist and infrastructural at once.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 2
As it stands, The War of Desire and Technology is a fast, fun and informative text that guides its readers into an otherwise obscure neck of the the virtual woods. ~~~~~~~~ By SADIE PLANT Sadie Plant is a Research Fellow in new media at Warwick University Copyright of New Statesman & Society is the property of New Statesman Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.
Mechanism · paragraph 1
In this, her first full book, she tells some good stories and makes some excellent observations about the postwar emergence of virtual systems. She brings Habitat--a graphic-interface world barely known outside Japan--to the attention of her western audience, and deals well with the fascinating corporate manoeuvres of the virtual industrial world. Compuserve, Atari, MIT's Media Lab, and Leicester's own W Industries are among the star performers in an often gripping account.
Style · paragraph 1
Database: Section: Record: 1 Ghosts in the machine. By: Plant, Sadie. New Statesman & Society.
Style · paragraph 1
Abstract: Reviews the book `The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age,' by Alluquere Rosanne Stone. (AN: 9512120709) Business Source Alumni Edition books GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE THE WAR OF DESIRE AND TECHNOLOGY AT THE CLOSE OF THE MECHANICAL AGE Alluquere Rosanne Stone MITPRESS,£15.95 Alluquere Rosanne Stone has become a well-known player in both the actual and virtual zones, wherever questions of identity or sexuality meet the realities of interactive media and digital telecommunications.
Appears in sections
Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, and Technical Subjects Primary section
Sadie Plant, Amy Ireland, and the technical, gendered, and synthetic subject positions running through the archive.